In her essay “Still Life with Caged Lion” (NER 32.2), Middlebury College professor Kathryn Kramer writes about life in one of the earliest creative writing programs at Johns Hopkins:

The heady moment of the week, when social and academic intensity came together, was in John Barth’s weekly writing seminar, in each of which two student stories were discussed. “I’d give that another turn of the dramaturgical screw,” Barth would say, in his courtly way—this cleverest of writers, whom I’d been startled to see in living color after his black-and-white book jackets, on which he appeared in heavy glasses and what looked like a lab coat.